At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch

Tracy.
    â€œHitler did some good things,” she conceded. “I won’t say he didn’t do some good things. He built the autobahn. He gave more people work. But…the other things, we know nothing about that. Very few Germans did.”
    â€œAnd if we did know,” added the husband, “what could we do?”
    Tracy paused over the equivocation. Correspondent Frank Reynolds broke in upon this film conversation shortly after nine o’clock to announce news from Selma, and ABC’s bonanza audience of forty-eight million unsuspecting viewers transferred from the mystery of Holocaust atrocities nestled among good Germans to real-life scenes of flying truncheons on Pettus Bridge. ABC News executives let the footage run nearly fifteen minutes—as long as Sheriff Clark had appeared on Issues and Answers —before resuming the film. CBS and NBC aired similar bulletins during regular programming, but the Nuremberg interruption struck with the force of instant historical icon.
    President Johnson, who received word during a small social dinner at the White House, decided to block it out until morning. He neither made nor received phone calls and retired promptly, but Lady Bird Johnson recorded her husband’s “cloud of troubles” in her diary entry for the night: “Now it is the Selma situation…and the cauldron is boiling.”
    She also quoted his private lament to friends that evening about Vietnam: “I can’t get out. I can’t finish it with what I have got. So what the hell can I do?” Johnson’s two rising worries converged almost to the minute, as the first Marine amphibian tractors touched Red Beach 2 at 9:03 P.M . Washington time, which was 9:03 Monday morning across the International Dateline in Vietnam. Squad leader Garry Parsons of Springfield, Illinois, led Battalion Landing Team 3/9 ashore near Da Nang. Ten-foot swells hampered the debarkation, crushing one soldier’s chest between a ship transport and a landing craft, but the battalion assembled at 9:18 and marched up the beach between welcoming lines of Vietnamese children, who hung a garland of flowers around the neck of Brigadier General Frederick J. Karch, commander of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, in ceremonies of optimism and relief.
    No one, including President Johnson, foresaw America’s first loss of a war, any more than the day’s tear gas victims pictured Selma as the last great thrust of a movement built on patriotic idealism. It was a turning point. The tide of confidence in equal citizenship had swelled over decades to confront segregation as well as the Nazis, and would roll forward still, but an opposing tide of resentment and disbelief rose to challenge the overall direction of American politics, contesting the language of freedom.
    Martin Luther King struggled in seclusion to secure something positive from the day’s harsh repulse. Resolving first to mobilize “a renewed march from Selma to Montgomery,” he issued a statement that night from Atlanta and asked aides to bring Rev. F. D. Reese to the telephone of the pastor’s office in Brown Chapel. Reese was president of the Dallas County Voters League, the host group in Selma founded by Amelia Boynton and her late husband.
    â€œMr. President, I understand you are having trouble over there,” said King, with fraternal understatement intended to comfort Reese.
    â€œYeah, we do,” said Reese. With Bevel, Young, Williams, and L. L. Anderson, he was preaching perseverance to a mass meeting of 450 wounded and numb.
    â€œWell,” said King, “I’m gonna put out a call for help.”

CHAPTER 6
The Call
    March 8, 1965
    T HE rout on Pettus Bridge ignited a week of passionate struggle about fundamental and historic issues. Would the pent-up conflict about Negro voting rights be settled in the streets, the courts, the legislatures, or not at all, and would results favor the